50 people who attended Delhi conference test positive in Tamil Nadu

Fifty people from Tamil Nadu who attended the religious congregation organised by Tablighi Jamaat in the national capital have tested positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday, prompting authorities to launch a frenzied search drive to trace hundreds of others who took part in the meeting.

The state witnessed its single biggest spike since the outbreak early this month on Tuesday with 57 people testing positive for coronavirus. Of these, 50 had attended the conference and returned to Tamil Nadu in the second or third week of March and the remaining seven have contact or travel history.

With the massive increase in the number of people testing positive for COVID-19, the total tally went up to 124, including six discharged and one dead, next only to Maharashtra and Kerala which have reported 302 and 215 cases respectively.

As the numbers increased exponentially, Health Secretary Dr Beela Rajesh made a fervent appeal to those who attended the conference to voluntarily report to the district administration. The state has so far traced only 515 people of the 1,500 who went for the event in Nizamuddin (West) in Delhi.

The conference or Thai cluster, as it is called now, is the biggest source of infection in the state so far, Chief Secretary K Shanmugam said even as the numbers showed at least 80 people of the 124 who have tested positive have direct or indirect links with the event. He added 1,131 of the 1,500 returned to the state from Delhi while nearly 400 people are still stuck in the national capital.

The indirect contacts include a 29-year-old doctor with Southern Railways and her 10-month-old baby who contracted the virus after treating a 63-year-old patient who came in contact with two Thai nationals after they returned from New Delhi.

Besides making a public appeal, the government was frantically trying to reach the mobile numbers of the people who have returned. The government is in possession of just their mobile numbers and not their address which is making it more difficult for them to track these people and their contacts.

A senior Health Department official, who is involved in the tracking process, told DH that these people went in groups to the conference and returned on different dates. “Some took trains, and some took flight. It will quite a herculean task to identify all the 1,131 people who have returned and their contacts. If they had travelled in trains, we need to quarantine those people as well,” he said.

“Of the people who we are yet to trace, many are not reachable. We are trying to reach them and have deployed various resources,” the official said.

The maximum number of positive cases from the cluster was reported from Tirunelveli district with samples of 22 people rendering positive, Tuticorin (1), Villupuram (3), Madurai (2), Kanyakumari (4) and Namakkal (18).

Shanmugam said identifying the returnees from New Delhi and their contacts were imperative to prevent further spread of COVID-19 in the state as 21 persons from this group alone have tested positive.

Dr Beela Rajesh said the containment plan of cordoning off the area where these positive patients lived will begin on Wednesday morning.

The health department official said the department swung into action after a Thai national, who died after testing negative for COVID-19, informed authorities that a group of people from Thailand were in Erode district.

“We then quarantined the six Thai nationals two of whom tested positive. And we launched efforts to track their history and even sealed a few streets that they visited in Erode. This is the biggest cluster we are worried about because of sheer number of people participated in the conference,” the official said.

The government has so far quarantined 74,533 people who returned from abroad, while lodging 79 asymptomatic passengers in quarantine facilities near airport and placing 364 under hospital isolation.